Creating useful and usable weather and climate information: insights from Participatory Scenario Planning in Malawi
For weather and climate information to be used at the grassroots level, it needs to be effectively interpreted and communicated so that it is both useful and usable to decision-makers, farmers and local-level planners. However, to date this information has not always met these requirements. With these issues in mind, this paper outlines experiences with Participatory Scenario Planning (PSP). PSP has been used in Malawi as a method to bring together producers and users of information to co-produce sector-specific advisories of (typically, seasonal) weather information to make it both useful and usable to the different user groups. The paper elaborates the process and the extent to which farmers have deemed the information generated to be useful and usable.
